Wolves At Our Door Read online

  Wolves At Our Door

  J P S Brown

  2oo8

  For My Wife Patsy

  The Songbird Who Sings In My Tree

  Even When It Gets Chopped Down

  ONE

  Jim Kane did not pilot the Cessna 172 airplane he called Little Buck, he wore it like a suit of clothes. He wore it anyplace he wanted to go in the sky, and he was confident that he could set it down anywhere he wanted on the ground.

  Now, he throttled down and trimmed to fly slow up the wide, dry Arroyo de los Mezcales in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico to look for his partner Juan Vogel. He followed the centuries-old horseshoe thoroughfare toward the foot of the Sierra. At the head of the arroyo, the trail led into the thick brush of the foothills. He throttled up, trimmed for slow climb, and skimmed tall leafy trees along the trail. As he approached the first mountain called Las Parvas, the Flocks, he saw Juan Vogel on a switchback near the top. The man and his mule stopped and turned their faces toward him. Kane veered away at full power and climbed until he was above Vogel and out of his sight around the side of the mountain. He banked against the mountain, flushed a flock of parrots out of a thick stand of oak trees, doubled back toward Vogel, leveled his wings and hugged the mountain, cut his power to descend in a whistling glide, burst into Vogel’s sight from around the shoulder of the mountain, smiled as he passed eye to eye with Vogel on his wingtip, and saw his partner’s face go serious as the mule danced on the edge of the high trail with surprise. He waved and powered on and flew through Puerto de las Parvas, Pass of the Flocks, a saddle below the crest of the mountain.

  Kane smiled because he was comfortable in his machine and having fun. Vogel had not smiled because he and his mule had seriously pounded each other’s butts for the past four hours. Vogel needed to climb the rest of the mountain, ride another two hours over high, rocky trails, and cross a deep gorge before he caught up to Kane.

  Jim Kane was seventy-five years old and Juan Vogel was eighty, and they had been partners fifty-five years. Vogel provided their partnership with Rancho el Trigo, five other ranches in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, and a farm at Cibolibampo on the coastal desert of Sonora. He and Kane bought cattle from other ranchers in the Sierra for export to the United States and raised native Mexican Corriente cattle. Kane provided the partnership with a ranch on the Arizona-Sonora border near Nogales where the partners also raised Corrientes.

  El Trigo airstrip came in sight as Kane flew through the saddle of the Pass of the Flocks. The airstrip was at almost the same altitude as the saddle. No one who ever flew with Kane believed that the slash in the timber that could barely be seen on the horizon was an airstrip when he first showed it to them from the saddle. The four-thousand-feet-deep Arroyo Hondo gorge lay four minutes away between Las Parvas and the airstrip. The strip’s top end and sides were hugged by tall ponderosa pines. The first foot of the runway lay on the very brink of a sheer cliff that fell away to the bottom of Arroyo Hondo. A dip in the middle of the strip made it look shorter than its nine-hundred-meter length. Beyond the dip, the runway sloped upward drastically to the feet of the pine trees at the end of the runway. Once a pilot committed and cut his power, he had to land because he would never be able to power on and clear the trees to go around and try again. With the tall pines on its sides and on its end, the dip, the steep climb, and its measly length, the strip looked more like a quarter-acre cornfield in dense forest than a place on which to land an airplane.

  At 6:00 a.m. in that month of May 2006, Jim Kane saw that everything looked good for a landing at El Trigo. The air was calmthe only chance advantage any pilot ever enjoyed at that strip. In another hour a tailwind from the southwest would whip up and make a landing perilous for any airplane, let alone one with as little power as Little Buck. Once that tailwind began to blow, nobody landed at El Trigo, not the good pilots who had landed there before, and certainly not the ones who found themselves gazing at it with disbelief for the first time. As Kane lined up on the strip, he looked down at the bottom of Arroyo Hondo more than forty-five hundred feet below. This was the Sierra Madre. A man could stand on the brink of the cliff on the end of the airstrip at five thousand feet and spit to the bottom of the arroyo. The spit would not touch anything but the bottom of the gorge.

  Thank God, the closer I get to the strip, the bigger it looks, Kane thought. He lowered his flaps and powered off for descent. Thank God for the stillness of the morning. Coolness goes with stillness for good landings. He wore Little Buck to the first foot of runway on the edge of the cliff, cut all power and floated to the ground, fell into the dip on his wheels, then rolled up the hill and stopped fifty feet from the end of the strip without having to brake.

  Adan Martinillo and his grandson Marco Antonio sat on top of a trinchera, a rock wall at the end of the runway, watched the airplane, and softly poked the wall with the spurs on their naked heels. The huaraches they wore on their bare feet were only tire-tread soles tied on with leather thongs. They held the reins of two saddled mules and one saddled horse that bugged their eyes, arched their necks, and stiffened their legs at the sight of the machine until Kane shut off the engine and the propeller fell still. The Martinillos did not move or change expression until Kane climbed out of the airplane.

  Kane had not seen them for a year and a half. He embraced them in turn with pats on the back and murmured his greeting with theirs. Kane saw that Martinillo had not taken on any weight or gray hair. Inside Kane’s embrace, the sixty-five-year-old was stout and strong as a green oak stump. Marco Antonio had grown longer legged, broader shouldered, and more muscular. He was only seventeen and would keep growing. His face still belonged to the little boy Kane had known since birth. He looked more like the men of his mother’s family than Martinillo. He was lighter complexioned and taller than his grandfather, a handsome youngster who knew his trails in that Sierra the way Kane’s grandchildren knew the streets of their cities. Kane had already done something about that. Two of his grandchildren knew the Sierra well, because they often visited it with him.

  Eighteen months before, a saddle horse had fallen off a mountain with the seventy-three-year-old Kane and rolled over him several times on the way to the bottom. Kane’s brain, liver, lung, kidney, and spleen had been bruised, a shoulder broken, his knee and tailbone shattered. When he and the horse stopped rolling, he found that his foot was caught underneath the horse in a broken stirrup, so he held the horse down on top of himself until his friend Andres "the Lion" Cañez found him a day later. The effort he made to save himself from being dragged to death by the horse nearly finished him. He lay close to death in the hospital for two weeks.

  The abrazos and pats on the back that the Martinillos gave him when he arrived at the airstrip showed that they were plenty glad to have him back. The feat of landing an airplane again at El Trigo also made him feel good, made him feel that he was on his way to make a hand as a horseman and a cowman again.

  To get around the sentiment that he and the Martinillos felt at his return, Kane walked up to the three-year-old chestnut stud named Gato that carried his saddle. The colt was the best of a band of good lookers that Kane and Vogel raised at El Trigo and would be their next herd sire.

  The band of horses into which Gato had been foaled had never walked on a level pasture or a soft trail. They knew how to make their living in heat, brush, and jungle at sea level, and they knew the high, cold, pine forests. They had never seen a painted wooden fence or a field carpeted only with sweet green grass, never drunk anywhere but in a running stream or a stagnant tank, never sheltered themselves anywhere but in the lee of a hill or under the branches of a tree or in a shady canyon. They knew to protect themselves from barbwire, cactus, and thickets with spines like scimitars
. They knew all the voladeros of their querencias, their haunts, the high, deadly places on the trails where cattle and horses, deer and javelina lost their footing and flew to their deaths into the canyons. They knew how to pick their way like goats to feed on steep, rocky aprons on the sides of mountains. They knew to watch and listen for el tigre, the jaguar, and el león pardo, the tawny lion, when they dipped their heads to drink, to graze, to browse, or to rest. So Kane and the Martinillos considered it a sort of miracle that day when he finally was able to walk up and admire Gato the stud. Kane did not have a scar on him to show that a horse had fallen off a fifty-foot cliff with him, and Gato did not have a scar or a blemish on his sleek hide to show for the three years that he had run free in the Sierra Madre. Two miracles.

  "Bueno, the horse came through his bronco youth in fine condition, didn’t he?" Kane said.

  "Yes, Jim, like you," Martinillo said, and he and his grandson laughed softly.

  "You’ve put my saddle on him, so I guess I’m the one who will have to ride him away from here."

  "Seguro. Of course. Who else could be the horseman for El Gato?"

  "His jinete who broke and trained him, I suppose," Kane said.

  "Trained him, that’s all. He has only been dominated to the extent that he’s gentle to the touch of a man of proper temperament. He has been trained to the extent that your touch on the rein will cause him to turn and stick his ears into his own tail, if you want him to. Who knows how a lesser man would get along with him?"

  "And who has broken him gentle as a dog with such a rein on him? You, Adan?"

  "No, my duties with El Trigo cattle kept me from it. I don’t have the touch that this horse required and deserved in his training. Marco Antonio is the horseman in our family. His touch can cool a fever. His heel only bends the hair without touching the skin of a saddle horse."

  "You, Marco Antonio?" Kane asked. "Did he buck?"

  "No, thank God, for he is the Cat," Marco Antonio said. "If he ever decided to buck, no man could ride him. I could have cheated him by riding him in the corral, but I rode him outside from the first day. Nothing but my hand has ever turned him."

  “Ahhh, that’s a good way to start a horse. He’s had the best, then."

  "Juan Vogel told us about your fall. He told us that he gave you his half interest in the horse while you were in and out of consciousness in the hospital, to prove his faith in your recovery. I knew he would have to be gentle when you came for him. When the horse saw how much I wanted him to surrender his wildness, I swear, he taught himself to be gentle. He made himself my friend. He’s also the friend of my sister Luci.

  My grandmother has ridden him and loves him. Sometimes all three of us get on him. You might hurt your sore and broken places in a thousand ways again in this Sierra, but this horse will not be the cause."

  Adan Martinillo's Las Animas ranch lay at the bottom end of Arroyo Hondo where it joined Arroyo de los Mezcales. Martinillo also worked as the mayordomo of El Trigo cattle. He was one of the few decent men who had stayed in the Sierra when drug traffickers invaded the region. He was a good vaquero and cowman, afraid of no man, and famous as a hunter of predators. People who knew him swore that he could follow a track by scent as well as any hound. Although he did not claim to be that good, he could explain his tenacity and success as a tracker and hunter no other way. He could track a lion, jaguar, or wolf across a league of smooth rock. When a predator invaded his region and threatened livestock and human life, Martinillo suspended his other duties and went after him.

  When he first met Jim Kane, he owned only a single-shot .22 rifle. With that rifle and only four rounds of ammunition, he tracked down and killed El Yoco, a full-grown jaguar that had come into the country to kill livestock and had killed at least one person.

  When the drug growers arrived in the country with Uzi machine guns that they called cuernos de chivo, the horns of a goat, an army cavalry troop had confiscated all the firearms on the ranches. Martinillo's .22 single-shot had been taken. A week later Kane smuggled in three new Winchester .22 magnum lever action carbines with five hundred cartridges apiece. Kane, Vogel, and Martinillo each had one. In that same load he brought three Remington 12-gauge pump shotguns with two hundred shells of oo buckshot for each gun. Those arms were kept hidden but always at hand.

  The ranch families of the Sierra had been at war against the drug traffickers of Sinaloa for thirty years. Most of the decent people had moved to the cities and abandoned their ranches to the intruders, although some youngsters and men stayed to fight. Martinillo had not been a youngster when the war began, but he stayed. His wife Lucrecia, oldest grandson Marco Antonio, and youngest granddaughter Luci also stayed, but his three sons had migrated with their families to the coastal desert of Sonora.

  The intruders from Sinaloa came heavily armed and began to till any land they could find beside active, hidden watercourses for marijuana and opium poppy crops, regardless of who owned the land. Owners the intruders did not kill were officially denounced to the government in Chihuahua City as drug growers. The intruders used the drug crops that they planted on the ranches as evidence against the owners. The crooked officials put the owners in the penitentiary and the invaders went on and raised the crops unmolested. One hundred and seventy-five ranch owners and young men native to the region had been killed in the war since it began in 1975. Adan Martinillo’s son Robe, the father of Marco Antonio and Luci, had been murdered on the trail as he returned to Las Animas one night with a pack string of provisions. At present, native sons had driven away most of the intruders, but this lull in the war was not expected to continue.

  While Kane and the Martinillos waited for Juan Vogel, Martinillo told Kane that recently a man named Arturo Mendez, a well-known liar and thief and errand boy for the Lupinos, had visited Martinillo to talk about harvesting timber after he had patrolled the region in a helicopter. He said that trees were being cut on the neighboring La Golondrina ranch that belonged to the Lupino family.

  "How did Arturo Mendez say the logs would be transported to a mill?" Kane asked. "The nearest mills are at Creel and Madera. Creel lies four hundred kilometers across trackless Sierra from here. La Golondrina is five hundred kilometers from Madera or Creel. Roads could not be built to access those mills in less than fifteen years."

  "Arturo said a helicopter will transport the logs off the mountain to the nearest road where trucks can pick them up," Martinillo said.

  "I don’t think so," Kane said. "It would cost more to skid one log off any of these mountains with a helicopter than it would to build ten big, comfortable houses on El Trigo or Las Animas."

  Martinillo kept a straight face and spoke in a soft voice, no matter how passionate he might feel about the stories he told, but Kane could see he did not care one dirty damn about helicopters or logs. ’Anyway, l don’t think Arturo Mendez was here to talk about logs," he said.

  "What did he really want?" Kane asked.

  "To do an evil thing"

  "What was that?"

  "To release wolves in our country."

  "No. What do you mean?"

  Marco Antonio laughed. "My grandfather tracked the helicopter."

  Martinillo smiled. ”No, but when it flew over my house from the direction of Guasisaco at the same hour for three straight days, I decided to see if I could find where it came from. I marked the spot I first caught sight of it each day, then waited for it at that spot the next day. I finally saw that it came from the direction of La Golondrina every day, hovered over the high ridge of Guasisaco awhile, then flew on past my house. I searched the ridge and found that it had landed on the devisadero of Guasisaco, the place everybody uses as a lookout point"

  "What did you read in the tracks?" Kane asked.

  "Men in the helicopter released five wolves. They linger there. They don’t want to leave."

  "They’ve probably been raised in a cage and don’t know how to make a living here."

  "That’s what I think. I went back
to watch them twice. Four females and a male, all young. I saw them again day before yesterday. They were gaunt and shrunken as though they had not found water."

  "They’ll find water soon enough. Then they’ll find cattle to eat."

  "That’s what I think."

  "Sure, they’ve been raised in cages, so they’ve been fed beef. The first animal they kill will be a cow. They’ll tear off her udder on the run, then devour her alive from tail to throat."

  "Why would anyone visit us with that kind of evil?"

  "I can’t give you a good reason, only that some people don’t have enough real work to do, so they entertain themselves with the idea that the world needs wolves to prowl cow country again."

  "That’s the reason they release wolves here?"

  "Probably. What were the markings on the helicopter? Did it show a number?"

  Martinillo opened the palm of his hand and handed Kane a slip of paper. "I memorized the numbers and wrote them down when I got home," he said.

  Kane took it. "With this I might find out who it belongs to," he said.

  "I think it belongs to the Lupinos." ·

  "What makes you think so?"

  "It came from that direction every day to keep track of the animals. It flew back toward La Golondrina. I’ve seen helicopters fly out of La Golondrina before, although I never thought to write down their numbers."

  "They’re from La Golondrina," Marco Antonio said. "I was riding circle on the cattle at Guazaremos on those days that my grandfather tracked the helicopter. It flew over me from the direction of La Golondrina every day and later it flew back and the sound of its motor stopped at La Golondrina."

  "Why would the Lupinos set wolves on us?" Kane asked.

  "You will have a chance to ask the old man. His grandson Ibrahim came to Guazaremos last week to tell me that they have gathered the three hundred yearlings you and my compadre Juan have come to get. There’s another thing," Martinillo said.

  "What?" Kane asked.